


sense and psychopathy

by liraels



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, also has nothing whatsoever to do with jane austen im just amusing myself, this is domesticity ostensibly, whatever fine less actual domesticity and more a rumination upon it through eve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:48:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26294389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liraels/pseuds/liraels
Summary: In the beginning, there is Eve.Well, it feels like a beginning. Like the conveyor belt or assembly line or roulette wheel that is her life – one or all of these descriptions might apply, depending on the day and the side of the bed she wakes up on – might finally be slowing to a stop. Ready to click over to another track, to go somewhere.Or, more accurately, to go someone.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 13
Kudos: 84
Collections: Killing Eve Week 2020





	sense and psychopathy

**Author's Note:**

> killing eve week…day 6? i.e. domesticity. sort of.

In the beginning, there is Eve.

Well, it feels like a beginning. Like the conveyor belt or assembly line or roulette wheel that is her life – one or all of these descriptions might apply, depending on the day and the side of the bed she wakes up on – might finally be slowing to a stop. Ready to click over to another track, to _go somewhere_.

Or, more accurately, to go some _one_. The someone plastered all over her desk, in cascading folders and files, on scraps shoved in between the pages of books. Carolyn wasn’t so wrong to suggest an affair might be a good cover for spy work, because she is not working a job or a task or an objective but a person. A very specific person.

This person is the very reason Eve is spending yet another late night in the study. There have been lot of those, recently. She is getting used to the crick that develops in her neck around 1AM, she is getting used to squinting at blue-lit photographs of mottled skin and mirrored blood, she is getting used to forgetting that there is another person in the house. Niko doesn’t snore, barely moves in his sleep. He is unobtrusive, sometimes annoyingly so.

Not that Eve spends a lot of time in bed, either. She fell asleep in her desk chair these past two nights, drooling atop a book. She always _means_ to go to bed, really, she does, she is not so young anymore and this kind of thing is bad on her back. But lately she never quite gets there. She refuses to examine that phenomenon closely.

This is what marriage is, she tells herself. It gets old. Like everything.

But here is something new.

She’s hit a wall in her train of thought, though, the books and webpages spread before her providing no easy answers. Why, she asks no one, might a trained and psychopathic assassin do a double take at glimpsing Eve by chance in a public bathroom? Why might she gift Eve clothing that fits her like it was made for her, why might she drop by only for dinner, why might she let the tip of her nose trail along the veins stretching up the side of Eve’s neck?

It doesn’t quite _fit_ , you see.

She shoves aside the criminology textbooks and turns back to one of the several bookshelves that line the walls of her office. Back to basics. Her fingers snag on her post-graduate copy of the DSM but they stop on the Cambridge English Dictionary. _Seriously_ basics. But perhaps…

She tips the dictionary open atop her knee, flicks through the pages.

psychopath  
noun   
/ˈsaɪ.kə.pæθ/  
 _psychology specialized_   
a person who has no feeling for other people, does not think about the future, and does not feel bad about anything they have done in the past

She sits back. Huh. A tad more poetic than the medical definition, definitely simplified, and not entirely accurate either. But does it _fit_ , is the question, does it tie the disparate pieces into some kind of comestible whole?

_Who are you_ , _what are you_ , she thinks, _and is it anything like this?_

She can’t know. Not yet. Perhaps she will.

1.

“Do you have feelings?” she will ask.

It’s been nearly two hours, alright, and Eve was carsick for most of it. She would like something else to think about that’s not her slopping stomach or the flick of the knife down her sternum or whatever it is that Villanelle might say or do to the Ghost once they’re in the same room. Especially that last one, the way the thought makes her insides flush and the back of her neck tingle with static. Pack that away, zip it up, shove it in shadow atop the wardrobe to rot.

Villanelle’s gaze flicks over from the window. What was she looking at, passing trees and traffic? Does that interest her? What on earth can she think of it, the ordinary world they pass by.

“What _is_ a feeling, Eve?” Villanelle counters slowly, shrugging a little. 

Eve should have expected this question, but she isn’t quite ready for it. She opts for the rote, dictionary-ish definition that pops first into her mind. “Like, a kind of sensation. Or an experience. But, er…it’s all inside. Do you have that?”

“You are trying to use your psychology on me.”

“And so what? It’s a conversation. Aren’t you bored?”

Villanelle looks back at the window. “Not right now,” she says. “But I can be. Sometimes. That’s what you would call a feeling, yes?”

“I – sure. But boredom is…I think most feelings are more…” She struggles now, aware that she may be revealing more about her own psyche than about Villanelle’s. “Like, _inside_. Not just in your brain but in your…chest, or stomach, or whatever.”

“Indigestion?”

“No. Okay, how about…happiness. It’s kind of – light? And it makes you smile without thinking about it, without having to force it.”

“Hm.” Villanelle is still looking out the window. “Maybe.”

“Or sadness. That’s heavier, I guess. Like a weight. And – anger? Which is hot. Like you want to lash out.”

Villanelle turns back to Eve, impassive, but at least she is looking at her now. “Maybe,” she says again. “I don’t know. I don’t like your descriptions.”

“Alright. Well…do you want to try?”

Villanelle shifts, then, turning against the seatbelt with a rustle of whatever very expensive material she’s draped in. Couldn’t she just wear some jeans, for once, a t-shirt, some sweatpants, something that doesn’t fall so perfectly over the curve of her side and her hip and everywhere _else_ that catches Eve’s eye like a snag, a trap with teeth?

She thinks Villanelle might have caught her looking, that time, because Villanelle says, “Desire, that’s a feeling. I feel that.”

“Oh. Right. What about, uh, fear or –“

“Don’t you want to hear about it? I tell you what you want to know and then you just move on. It’s callous, Eve.”

It’s Eve’s turn to glance out the window, just for a second’s reprieve. “Fine. Tell me about your _desire_ , whatever.” Shit, she’s putting it on, too casual, too thick.

When Eve looks back, it’s to see Villanelle flashing a smile with all her teeth. “It’s not what you are thinking. I have enough sex to satisfy me, I don’t often desire it.”

“Sure.” Shut that down right now, Eve Polastri, shut it _down_.

“But I do want things. I feel that _inside_ , if you like. In my stomach. Back of the neck. I usually don’t like it. So I go and I get the things I want, and then I don’t feel it anymore.”

“What…things, then? If not…”

“Sex? Not everything is sex, Eve. Do you know that?”

Eve just – grunts. Because, fuck. What the fuck. She crosses her legs and leans closer to the window, incidentally shuffling a little further away from Villanelle.

“I _want_ to go to work,” Villanelle pronounces. “And I want to go home once I’m finished. I want money, and I want to spend it. I want nice things and I want to look at them.”

“Sounds pretty simple.”

“Oh, yes. But it often isn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because some things, Eve…” And here Villanelle pauses, pivots a little, makes sure she has Eve’s eye. Of course, she does. Imagine looking away, Eve might die first. “…some things, they play hard to get. And some things _are_ hard to get. And with _some things_ …” Something twangs in the air, a plucked string, a snapped cord – “the wanting part is just as good as the rest of it.”

There are two seatbelts and half a metre of space between them, but suddenly it feels like nothing at all. All that air compressed into the millisecond before skin touches skin. Except it doesn’t, it never does, as always the anvil hovers and the sand stills in the hourglass.

Eve swallows. Says through a croak, “So this – feeling –“

“Desire. Want. The Christians say _covet_.”

“Okay, yeah, and – do you feel it – _for_ people? Like is it just. A you thing? Or does it make you – care about other people? I don’t mean positively, necessarily, just – whether it makes you give a shit about what happens to them, or what they do.”

Eve is sure she could have delivered that a little more succinctly but, yes, Villanelle’s unwavering gaze and the way she’s touching her tongue to her bottom lip every few minutes – so red, red and black, violence in colour – it’s making Eve nervous. She shifts in her seat.

“Sometimes,” Villanelle says simply, and Eve feels even more stupid.

Villanelle casually wets red, red lip again, and Eve realises she’s subconsciously mirrored her only when Villanelle’s eyeline flicks down conspicuously, brazenly.

“What else do you feel?” Eve asks quickly.

Villanelle relaxes a little, but the feeling doesn’t dissipate. “What else? I told you. I get bored, mostly. I think that’s the same as yours.”

“My boredom?”

“Yes. Like how you are bored of your home and your life and your husband.”

“I’m not,” Eve says.

“It’s okay to admit it.”

“No, it’s not. I mean, I’m not.”

Villanelle twists her mouth in a way that threatens a smile but doesn’t quite get there. She looks back out the window, where the trees that rush by are thickening and darkening, they must be close to the Forest of Dean, now.

“You lie a lot, Eve,” Villanelle says to the window. “You are also very bad at describing feelings. I think, sometimes, maybe _you_ are the psychopath.”

2.

“Have you thought about the future?” she will ask.

They are in a different car, in a different time, and each of them are almost different people. She should not be asking this question with a revolver on her lap and Villanelle gunning the run-down sedan past the speed limit, but of course she asks it anyway. She sees so little use in holding back, now. That kind of thing always ends with a knife or a gun and at least one of them half-dead.

“Like, how?” Villanelle asks distractedly, head-checking for tails.

“I don’t know.” Eve has never been the type to have a five-year plan, but her brain can’t seem to root in the present these days. She can’t see the future – it’s blank, formless – but she thinks about it incessantly. “Where you think you might be a year from now. Ten years. Or more. Who you’ll be with, what you’ll be doing, stuff like that.”

“Eve. You understand the likelihood of us both being killed in the next 24 hours is not even close to zero.”

“Okay, yes, fine. Well, where would you _like_ to be, then. I’m talking a scenario where we’re not on the Twelve’s hitlist.”

Villanelle cuts across to Eve for the briefest second. Since London, she’s looked – not softer, but maybe just a little less. Not in a bad way; it’s like what’s been trimmed is the fat, the outer layers, the embellishments that are really just distraction. Eve hopes she’ll get a little more than 24 hours to understand why. What’s been bared, tender skin beneath the scab. There’s a perverse urge to scratch.

“You are too vague,” Villanelle says. “Give me a date.”

“Okay, uh. Twenty years. You’ll be, forty eight? What are you doing?”

“Mmm. I am…” Villanelle rocks her head from side to side, considering. “You are the one who can’t stop thinking about my face. Maybe we will be together, then. In a different, less-shitty car, running away from different and less-shitty people. A Lamborghini.”

“In twenty years?” Eve can’t see it. She can’t see anything, really, at least not that far ahead, not even them. “We’ll tear each other apart, by then. Or someone else will do it for us. The…shitty people.”

“Hm. I’d rather we did the tearing ourselves.” And here Villanelle shoots her a smile, too-wide and too-thin, so Eve laughs because she has to. Because this fragility is new and though she wants to pick at it she doesn’t at all know what she’s doing.

“Why are you asking this weird question?” Villanelle asks, smile gone as quick is it came.

“I don’t know. I –“ She hasn’t had any concrete conception about the path of her life in months. Not since – not since Rome, now that she thinks about it, when Villanelle’s vision of the future had been spaghetti and Alaska and Eve’s had been _not that_.

“Do you want me to say –“ Villanelle scrunches her face up a little, and when she speaks it’s light and airy and east-coast American. “Oh, _Eve_ , I can see it clear as day – I will be in the kitchen cooking and not killing people, and you will be coming home from work where you don’t kill people, and I will kiss you in the doorway and take your coat and then I’ll serve you dinner and you will say, _this is lovely, honey_ , and then we will go to bed and neither of us will think about killing people.”

It’s jarring. Eve swallows it down, a glob of unease, _disgust_ , almost. The going to bed bit doesn’t sound too bad, though. Another time, Eve.

“I thought you didn’t want to kill people anymore,” Eve points out.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t think about it.”

When Eve doesn’t push the conversation any further, the silence starts as a crumb. It builds, gathers as the car speeds onwards, and surely Eve is not the only one who feels it. This oppressive lull. A new brick slapped down between them with every passing minute.

She’s fucked it up. She’s pushed too far, scratched too hard at sensitive skin.

Eve pulls her hair from its tie, lets it spill messily over her shoulders, a protective veil. Villanelle doesn’t look over, she’s fixated on the road, almost unnaturally so. But it’s then that Eve realises that Villanelle has very deliberately placed her hand beside the gearstick, palm-up.

She continues to shake out her hair because the action is all that’s keeping the silence from diving down her throat and choking her up. She can’t keep it up forever – she doesn’t want to. Eventually, she lays her hand there, atop Villanelle’s. Villanelle doesn’t flinch, doesn’t even curl her fingers between Eve’s own.

But it’s something, this is something. It surely cannot last.

3.

“Do you remember Bill?” she will ask.

There are many reasons she should not be asking this question, the most trivial of which being: it’s a Monday, it’s early, she has work in an hour and Villanelle is already late for class.

It’s a Greek lecture, apparently. Villanelle prefers Romance languages, which is why she’s late, but still. She’s broadening her horizons. Eve suspects she just wants to take them to the Cretan islands.

Villanelle frowns down at her phone around her mouthful of toast. It’s still strange. All of it is, but especially this: Eve will put two slices of bread in the toaster on a Monday morning and Villanelle will snatch one of them and slather it with a lot of butter and Eve will eat the other slice with some jam and less butter. It is also strange that she’s thinking about how much butter they both eat and how Eve always pretends the second slice was for her when they both know it was for Villanelle and that neither of them point it out.

They don’t point anything out. There are many holes in them, waiting to be poked, but they don’t poke them. Instead, they play many games of charades.

But it’s a Monday morning and Eve is late for work and Villanelle is late for class and Eve is _poking_.

“Your friend,” Villanelle says, finally.

“You remember?”

“I remember everyone.”

“And?”

“And what?”

It’s a lost cause. She doesn’t even know where to poke, really, or what she might be trying to reveal. “And nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

So they don’t worry about it.

They cycle through the remainder of their morning routine. Eve doesn’t feel the clockwork steps of it even more than she usually does. Or she feels much less than she usually does, or she feels nothing more than she usually does. Whatever. It’s a weird morning, and it’s throwing the overall weirdness of them – living together, sharing toast, entering the kitchen and leaving it without threatening anyone with a knife – into sharp relief.

The two of them are circling around each other in the narrow hallway, gathering up coats and boots and scarves, when Villanelle stops and remarks, “You were going to ask me if I regret killing him.”

Well, yeah. Eve shrugs and crouches down to tie up her shoes.

“I don’t,” Villanelle says plainly. “He was one of the best ones. He was fun, and he led me to you, didn’t he? And you to me. We will always have Paris.”

True. “Okay,” Eve says. What else can be said, really.

“Do you regret it?” Villanelle asks.

“Regret what? _You_ killed him.”

“I meant – Whatever, Eve,” Villanelle says dismissively, brushing past Eve on the way out the door. But she stops, abruptly, reaching back to grab Eve’s lapel.

Eve looks up from her shoes and only has the time to straighten slightly before Villanelle kisses her, hard and quick past lips to tongue and teeth.

They are like this often. Sudden, out of the blue, unexplained. Passion bursting and then dissipating in the very next second, like salve on a burn, or perhaps it’s the other way around. Perhaps they are the burn. It’s not like the first time, because the first time was on a bus in the wake of a bruising rejection and a loving gunshot wound. But it’s still a tiny bit like the second time, and the third, and the rest.

Villanelle pulls away after a minute, both of them breathless. The heat of the kiss dissipates almost instantly, soothed, or – if it is indeed the other way around – blistering like an old wound re-agitated. Eve can never really tell with these things, she thinks Villanelle sees them more clearly than she.

Villanelle shrugs on her coat and unlocks the front door but then pauses in the open entranceway. “I killed someone last weekend,” she says.

“Oh.” Eve works her lips together; they’re tender. It’s been a while. “Who?”

“I was thinking about leaving,” Villanelle says, not answering the question. “University is boring. This city is boring. You have a boring job. You eat boring toast.”

“Oh.”

“I eat the toast, too.”

“So, who was it?”

“He took little kids. Sold them across borders. I did my research, don’t worry about it.”

Eve knows Villanelle doesn’t care, but it’s nice. Considerate. “Thank you,” she says. “Did you like it?”

“No,” Villanelle answers. “I didn’t. Would you rather that I’d left him for you?”

It’s such a bare, raw question. Like a hot poker. “I don’t know.”

Villanelle nods once and shuffles outside. The front door shuts behind her without a goodbye. Eve returns to the task of tying her shoes and thinks briefly about whether she’ll need to go to the shop on her way home from work, or if she should ask Villanelle to do it.

She wonders how Villanelle killed him, but that’s a question she can leave for later. She’ll ask it the next day she’s feeling bored.


End file.
